The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (17 page)

The drones start to ignore me, concentrating their
fire on the backs of the fleeing troops, though they still take the
occasional pot-shot at Lyra: I have to get in the way of a spray of
AP fire meant for her, and take another battering for it. Then I
catch two darts flying at her. She looks at me wide-eyed when she
sees me pluck them out of the air, my hand a blur that cuts the air
next to her head like a bullwhip.

“You need to be
running
,” I tell her as I kill
the offending drones. But then I see: We’re cut off. The AAV
landing zone is being overrun just as the body of the panicked
force is trying to pile into the troop bays. Two ships burst as
they try to lift off, hit by RPGs. One manages to limp off, bay
smoking, bodies falling out of it, but the other noses into the
green and the fuel tanks go up in a succession of flash-blazes of
hydrogen and oxygen, kicking mushrooms of bright fire into the sky.
The other ships launch before they’re loaded, leaving troops behind
on the ground as the Harvesters descend on them from all sides.

“Push
through
!” I shout on their channel,
flashing the nearest designated exfil point into their HUDs. Then I
spend a few of my remaining magazines killing Harvesters to start
making them a hole. “Move!
Move!
”

Someone takes the lead, rallies others, and the rest
fall in behind. They break through into the green, but take more
losses as they go.

In their wake, the blasted landscape is littered with
H-A suits. I wonder how many of these bodies will reanimate, adding
to Asmodeus’ army of rotting corpses. I see a trooper pull a dart
out of a gap between his plates, fall to his knees, pull off his
helmet, say a quick prayer and shoot himself in the head. I know
his body will still likely become a drone, but he’s spared himself
having his brain eaten and sensor stalks slowly driven outwards
through his eye sockets. I guess it’s becoming obvious to even the
line troops that they have no “cure” for infection, other than
slowing it, drawing the agony out.

“
Lyra! Move it!!
” It’s Horton. He’s followed
us into the canyon, picking off Harvesters to cover us. Sharp is
with him, but she looks frozen, terrified, following only because
it’s all she knows to do. In L-As, they’re as good as naked out
here to both AP rounds and darts. I don’t see Corso or Sung. “We
need to be leaving! Exit! Now!”

He’s right. With the main force retreating through
the forest, some of the Harvesters are turning back after the
stragglers out in the open, which includes the four of us and at
least ten others I can see, some injured, some just hugging the
rocks in terror, afraid to move.

I’m down to my last full magazine. It’ll take hours
to days for my nanites to make more caseless ammo, depending on
available resources. I grab the nearest dropped weapon and empty
it, scanning for the most promising retreat. We can’t go out the
way we came in. We’ll have to climb over the treacherous terrain.
And since we’re in a bowl, we can’t see what’s waiting for us on
the other side of the crater rims. Even hacking the designated
mission satellite is no help: The drones don’t radiate enough heat
to track from orbit, and there’s too much smoke from the downed
ships to get clear visual. (That means the UN commanders are as
blind as we are.)

I hear screaming up the slope to the west of us,
someone shouting desperately for pickup, shouting for a medic,
shrieking for help. They don’t sound military. They’re not. I see
what looks like a small group of civvies in some kind of basic
thermal gear, masks and protection. One is down, being helped by
two others while a third is shouting and waving for a flight that’s
either been blown up or is long gone, headed to exfil points set
nearly a klick from here. Lucky for them, there aren’t that many
Harvesters that way right now, so I shout for Lyra and her team and
the other survivors to follow. It takes a second barked order from
Horton to get the wounded and terrified troopers moving. We all
start scrambling as fast as we can over the treacherous talus and
up-slope to join the abandoned civvies.

I shoot one mangled Harvester crawling their way. The
shouting man sees me and starts waving and calling for us to help,
but then I see him shot through the chest. He looks at me dumbly
for an instant before he collapses. One of the others helping the
wounded man dives to check him, bawling in grief and horror. Horton
locks the drone that made the shot and bursts its head. Lyra drops
two more. They just fall, like they’ve been turned off.

When I get up to the civvies, I realize they’re not
only unarmed, they’re equipped with camera gear. They appear to
have had two armed security people, but both are already dead. The
wounded man, who’s been shot high up in the left thigh, has a
minimal transparent mask and goggles, and under them he appears to
be wearing makeup.

“What the fuck is this?” I have to demand out loud,
looking at insanity in the middle of nightmare.

“You… You’re
him
! You’re
Ram
! The
nano-hybrid! Face-real!” one of the others stammers at me like he’s
simultaneously star struck and scared of me more than the
Harvesters.

“Embedded reporter,” Horton tells me distastefully as
he fires surgically in our wake. Sharp has gotten enough of her
nerve back to help him, but she’s a much poorer shot. Lyra
scavenges the dead security team, recovers a fresh PDW and a pair
of pistols. And ammo, which she divides with me and Horton.

“This is
Gil Ryan
!” the other civilian, a
young woman, tells me like I should have instantly recognized the
man in the makeup. “The UNN anchor!”

Oh, great. A celebrity.

He looks like he’s passed out, probably in shock, but
he’s not bleeding profusely enough for his leg wound to prove fatal
in itself.

“This way!” Lyra indicates a nearby burning ASV
wreck, part way down the far slope. It’s spewing enough smoke to
give us visual cover that way. I waste a few rounds putting holes
in the external tanks to make sure they aren’t still pressurized.
The remaining hydrox mix blazes a mushroom of fire into the air as
it bleeds off, but it won’t blow on us now, and maybe it’ll serve
as a signal, get some friendly eyes on us. We move into the acrid
smoke, keeping low.

But now that I’m on high ground again, I can see that
we won’t be getting assistance our way any time soon. The remaining
aircraft are hovering over their designated exfil points, and I can
see the barely-coordinated retreat pushing through the green,
dividing to head for individual aircraft, which are using their
thrust jets to batter down the growth and create rough landing
zones. As the troopers make these points, they start loading with
only slightly better discipline than they did when they were
getting swarmed by drones.

There’s gunfire at one of the LZs, but just single
shots, too few and far between to be defensive. I zoom in on the
clearings, and watch a trooper get pushed down by his fellows. He
puts up his hands to beg, but gets shot down by them, right through
the visor. I see this happen two more times. The easy guess is
they’re killing the infected.

The ships lift off as soon as their bays are full,
leaving behind dozens, to fly south toward the Grave base. By my
count, they’ve lost half their aircraft. Jackson tries to reassure
the abandoned troops that the remaining ships will be back as soon
as they can unload, fifteen minutes, and orders them to hold the
LZs.

“We need to move,” I tell my charges. “Right
now.”

Lyra’s put a basic pressure bandage on Ryan’s leg.
He’s barely with us, still lost in shock, babbling. His crew try to
help him up, but don’t have the fortitude for it, not even in .38
gravity—these new-drops should be relatively superhuman until their
muscles start to adjust. So I reach down, grab Ryan by his minimal
protective vest, and pick him up like luggage, get ready to sling
him over my shoulder.

Lyra stops me, looks me in the eye, then discreetly
pulls a Harvester dart out of Ryan’s back.

I carry him anyway.

Horton barks at the others to get moving.

It’s hard going over the demolished landscape, and it
gets even worse when the ground underfoot shifts from rocks and
boulders to the crushed down and shattered growth at the perimeter
of the bombardment zone. And we continue to take fire from the
tenaciously pursuing drones, losing two of our company despite
their sloppy shooting.

When we make it into the standing forest, we get the
benefit of visual cover, but lose sight of the exfil points.
Thankfully, I have them mapped in my visual graphics. The surviving
flights haven’t come back yet, so we may still have time to get to
an active LZ, but we have more than half-a-klick to cross before
the nearest one, and that’s through thick growth.

The Harvesters keep shooting blindly at us through
the growth, managing to catch one of the troopers in our group in
the plate-gap at his waist, blowing a hole through from kidney to
lower abdomen. Sharp catches him and impressively keeps him moving,
pressing a hand into the entry and exit wounds as she provides a
crutch.

“Sharp’s Upworld,” I whisper to Lyra as I carry Ryan
over my shoulder like a sack of mumbling flour. “Do you know her?
What’s her deal?”

“She was captured and held by the Silvers,” Lyra
edges close to tell me. “The Forge. At Nike. Less than a day, but
no idea what they did to her. She hasn’t said.”

My limited dealings with the Forge have shown me that
they’re merciless to perceived invaders, but I don’t know if they
torture or rape captives. Despite the fact that they live
exclusively underground and keep themselves almost constantly
covered in layers of heavy handcrafted plate armor, they’ve seemed
civilized and honorable during my few meetings with them. (But
then, they have reason to be afraid of me, and fear makes for good
manners.)

Given how traumatized she seems, I figure she would
have been shipped home it there wasn’t a quarantine indefinitely in
place. Command probably thought they were giving her—and Horton—an
easy duty, babysitting Lyra and her experimental Mod-sensing gear,
in an op that should have been a cake walk. They weren’t even
supposed to be on the front line.

I look at Sharp without trying to look like I’m
looking. With a fellow soldier to take care of, she’s gotten her
shit back together.

Then I notice Horton is nursing his right side.

“Sergeant?” I ask discreetly.

He shows me a Harvester dart he’d stuck in his
pocket.

“It’s okay,” he tries to reassure me. “It didn’t get
through my L-As. Hit plate. Lucky.”

He isn’t convincing. He falls back, makes sure the
stragglers are still keeping up, even though that hangs him out in
the line of pursuit fire.

But pursuit isn’t our only problem. Besides the
random blind shot that still flies our way through the growth at
our backs, I also hear gunfire way up ahead. It’s muted and
diffused by the green, making it hard to determine distance and
direction, but I can guess it’s coming from the exfil points. I
hear what sounds like random sprays answered by slower measured
fire.

I signal a hold. We’ll need to proceed slowly, and
announce ourselves so we’re not mistaken for drones and shot at
before we’re identified.

Horton starts to make the call, but I silence him
before he gets two words out. I’m reading motion in the growth all
around us, coming toward us. I’m thinking that Asmodeus may have
salted this part of the forest with EMP-shielded drones, and Lyra
quickly confirms my theory by pointing out an artificial hole in
the ground, hidden in the undergrowth. It’s a tube, buried just
below the surface, hatch slid open, the surface layer of dirt that
poured in forming a negative silhouette around a rough body-shape
that used to be inside.

I start pointing out the motion that my enhancements
are picking out. I count what may be nine drones, all probably
within a dozen meters, all around us, scanning for heat, sound and
motion as they shuffle at our target-rich group.

Those of us that still have ammo raise our weapons,
but none of us have clear targets. Conversely, the drones can
simply shoot at us blindly through the…

I hear the whistling and slicing of something flying
fast through the green, punctuated by the distinctive squish and
pop of a blade penetrating a skull and module. Then there’s the
rustle of something much larger, running fast. Unnaturally fast.
But not at us. Toward the drones.

“Stay down!” I order my charges, then push into the
growth, leaving Lyra and Horton my borrowed gun and ammo. I draw my
knife, starting to miss my lost sword.

I come across a downed drone with a handmade throwing
knife through its head. I recognize the manufacture, but it makes
little sense being here.

The forest crunches and twists as a drone staggers
toward me, weapon raised, but not at me. I move to intercept it, to
spike it through the skull, when another blade comes flying very
fast end-over-end through the green and nearly splits the drone’s
head.

“
Mistress!
He’s here!”

She steps out of the green so I can see her. She’s
still wearing her worn, mismatched work gear and partial handmade
armor, bristling with dozens of knives like the ones thrown so
powerfully and accurately at the drones. She was always
phenomenally good with her namesake weapons, but what I’m seeing
now…

“Lord Ragnarok,” she greets me formally, bowing
quickly, using the name I’d rather no one ever did.

“Mackenzie,” I call her by her birth name, rather
than her earned one: Mak the Knife.

Tranquility Cast. A long, long way from home.

I’m about to ask what’s she’s doing so far east, and
so quickly—I saw her when I stopped at Tranquility just before I
met with Jackson and Richards, only ten days ago. But then the
forest all around me is full of rushing, of body-sized shapes
running fast through the growth like projectiles. When they stop, I
hear more sounds of violence perpetrated against skulls and
modules, and bodies dropping.